Samuel Fabayo shows three new Auto Layout features: Wrap moves child elements to a new line at breakpoints, Min/Max width constraints prevent elements from shrinking or expanding beyond limits, and combining them creates responsive cards that adapt across desktop, tablet, and mobile without manual adjustments.
Recently, Figma announced some interesting new updates at their annual design conference. One of the new updates that was announced is an improvement to the auto layout feature. Auto layout is one of the most used features on Figma, and it has evolved over time to improve how designers and developers collaborate with each other. In today's video, I'll be taking you through some of these updates and how you can use them to improve your designs. With that being said, let's get into it. We're in Figma now. And this is a simple project card that you can find in any project management tool. This card has been designed in auto layout already, and as you can see, it's divided into 3 sections: the image, the project title and description, and then the team with avatars of the team members and their initials in it. As you can see, this has been designed in auto layout already, so it's responsive whenever I stretch and whenever I shrink it. Now let me show you one of the cool new features that Figma has introduced into auto layout. If I shrink this card, you can see that the avatars here are hanging out, which doesn't look appropriate. And if I want to change this, before this feature was introduced, I have to remove this from auto layout, readjust it. It's just a lot of manual process. Now with auto layout, what I can do here is that I can click this child element here that has the avatars, and then I can wrap it. This is the wrap feature. Before this feature was introduced into Auto Layout, what we had was the vertical layout which would outline all your elements vertically, or the horizontal layout which would take it back to the way it was. But now with the wrap button, once you click that, it tells Figma to wrap those elements once it gets to the breakpoint of that particular element. So if I shrink this further now and it gets to this breakpoint, it just wraps it and I don't have to do anything. This is a really, really cool feature, but that's not all of it. There's something else that Figma has also introduced that just makes my life so much easier. So for example, if I have these and I increase all of this like this and I keep stretching this out, you can see that this text has stretched so much that it doesn't even look nice again for a reader. It's not always good for a reader to read long lines of text like this, right? So what I can do here again is to first of all reduce this to the way it was before and then specify a maximum width for this text. So I can come here now, and now there's a dropdown here that I can click, and then I can add a max width for this particular text. And I can say I want my maximum width to be 3— to be 400, for example. This means that when this text gets to this point, it stops growing, and the other elements in the card can continue to grow. Right, so let me show you what that looks like. So when I continue to stretch this and it gets to this point, it stops growing. And then if I bring it back down, it starts shrinking. I can also specify a minimum width where I don't want it to shrink beyond that point. This is a really, really cool feature as well. Now there's one more thing that was actually very, very mind-blowing for me in the ways that you can combine the wrapping feature and the minimum and maximum width specification. Let me create a new huge frame here. Uh, this is going to be a very, very big frame. Yeah, I need it to be really big. Great, great. So we are going to copy our project card into this frame. Where did it go? We're going to copy our project card into this frame. I hope it's in the frame. Yes, it looks like it is. Good. So now with our project card in this frame, let me change the background of this frame as well so the card can pop a bit. Uh, yeah, this looks good. So now with our project card in this frame, what I want to do now is to show you how you can combine minimum width, maximum width, and wrapping to enhance your design. So let's think of this scenario. You want to design for multiple devices. You want to design for a desktop device, you want to design for a tablet, and you also want to design for a mobile app. So I'm going to duplicate this card like this and assume that this is a desktop view for the cards, right? So I'm going to pick all of this and I would put it in one good auto layout. I can also use Shift+A for my auto layout, or I can just select it by picking it from the options by right-clicking. So now I can go in here and specify the spacing that I want between my cards. Now that I've specified the spacing, I'm going to pick each of these cards and set them to fill container. This means that whenever I stretch this card and whenever I shrink it, it always fills the container. Right now what I want to do is that since this looks like a desktop view, I want to specify a minimum width for each of this card so that it is going to become the breakpoint for each of this card so that when I shrink it, it changes into other device sizes. It changes into a size for a tablet or a mobile device. So what I'm going to do again is to pick each of these. I already set it to fill. I'll come here and add a minimum width. And I can make my minimum width 240, for example. So with a minimum width of 240, I can reduce this, and then you can see that it's, um, shrinking and it's growing. I can reduce this, and up to this point it stops because I've specified this as my minimum width. So even if I continue, it is not going to move beyond that point. Now the good thing about this is using the wrap feature in Auto Layout, I can click wrap And it just drops this to the next line. I can also increase this so that it fills the entire thing. Now it's dropped this into the next line, and this looks like something that could probably work for me in a tablet view. I can continue to shrink it further again, and then once it gets to the minimum width again, it breaks it again into 4. And then if I continue doing that again, it breaks it again into single cards that can most likely work for a mobile view. So this is one of the most amazing features that Auto Layout has had so far, and it makes my workflow so much easier whenever I'm designing for multiple screens. I hope you've been able to learn a thing or two from this video. Now go ahead and make some cool stuff using Auto Layout. Don't forget to like this video, share with your friend, and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this. I'll see you in the next one. Bye!
